Depth cameras are used in many applications, including but not limited to gaming, manufacturing and medical imaging. Conventional depth cameras provide the ability to acquire a detailed representation of a scene in a compact and easy-to-implement manner. From a single stationary position, a depth camera acquires image data which consists of a two-dimensional image (e.g., a two-dimensional RGB image, in which each pixel is assigned a Red, a Green and a Blue value), and a depth image, in which the value of each pixel corresponds to a depth or distance of the pixel from the depth camera. This image data, consisting of a two-dimensional image and a depth image, will be referred to herein as a two-dimensional depth image.
It is often desirable to register two-dimensional depth images with one another. Registration may facilitate the association of portions of a two-dimensional depth image with features of a corresponding model of an imaged object, the tracking of an imaged object through multiple successively-acquired two-dimensional depth images, and many other use cases.
An object of interest may be embedded in a cluttered environment, such as an operating/examination room or a production floor, and two-dimensional depth images thereof may therefore include many background structures. These structures hinder the ability to identify the object of interest and perform accurate registration of the two-dimensional depth image with other image data (e.g., a computer-aided design (CAD) model) of the object.